Intersections of nativism and football fandom in Zimbabwean online spaces

Abstract

Post-2000 Zimbabwe is characterised by the ZANU PF government’s nativist nationalism. Within literature on sports in Zimbabwe, studies exploring connections between nativist nationalism and sports are scarce. This article uses the case of a ‘white’ Portuguese football coach, Paulo Jorge Silva, to explore intersections of nativism and football fandom in Zimbabwe’s online spaces. Silva was appointed as coach of Zimbabwe’s most popular Premier Soccer League team Dynamos FC in 2016. Guided by the nativism concept, selected online fandom comments targeting Silva as Dynamos FC coach, were subjected to critical discourse analysis. Comments expressed that the relationship between Dynamos and a ‘white’ coach was likely to end in failure since it was akin to reversing gains of the liberation struggle at a time when the government had crafted indigenous black empowerment policies.

Keywords:

• Dynamos FC
• football
• nativism
• online fandom
• Zimbabwe

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments. I am also indebted to my colleagues Albert Chibuwe, Oswelled Ureke & Umali Saidi for critical insights on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ethnicity revolves around cultural factors such as nationality, culture, ancestry, language and belief (Taylor 2006).

2 The groups include the Shona, who are the numerically dominant, followed by the Ndebele. There are also other social groups usually categorised under the nomenclature ‘minority’. These include the Kalanga, Nambya, Venda and the Tonga. Moreover, descendants of immigrants from Malawi 3, Zambia and Mozambique who migrated into the country during the colonial era also make up the Zimbabwean population (Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009; Ncube 2014).

3 The term ‘Coloured’ is often used to refer to off springs born out of intermarriages between whites and blacks.

4 At the Earth Summit held in South Africa in September 2002 during the course of farm invasions Mugabe denounced the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, telling him to keep his Britain and allow him to keep his Zimbabwe (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009a).

5 The policy was reviewed in November 2017 following the inauguration of a new President Emmerson Mnangagwa.